Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [96]
By the time they were done with that meeting it was late, the wind barreling through the empty streets of the federal district.
“What about dinner?” Diane said to Frank when they had a moment in private, and Frank nodded. She said, “I still don’t know any restaurants around here, but we can look.”
“Maybe over toward the Capitol. For some reason the whole area around George Washington University is pretty dead this late at night, I don’t know why.”
“Let’s see what we find.”
And off they went, on another date in the nation’s capital.
It was a fun date. They found a Greek restaurant, and sat across a little table and talked over the meeting and the day and everything else. Frank drank a glass of retsina, a glass of ouzo, and a cup of Greek coffee, all while wolfing down dolmades, sliced octopus arms in oil, and moussaka. He laughed a lot. Looking across the table at Diane’s round face, so vivacious and intelligent, so charismatic and powerful, he thought: I love this woman.
He could not think about the feeling. He shied away from the thought and just felt it. Everything else at the moment was unreal, or at least nonpresent. He focused on the present in the way Rudra was always encouraging him to do. The advantages of such a focus were evident in a certain calmness that spread through him, a feeling that might have been happiness. Or maybe it was the food, the alcohol, the caffeine. The tastes and looks and sounds. Her face. Were those what happiness consisted of? A smile, a glance, as the old man had said—what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Afterward they walked back to the compound, and Frank walked her to her car in the underground parking lot.
“Good night, that was nice.”
“Yes it was.” She looked up and Frank leaned over, their lips met in a perfect little kiss, and off he went.
He drove to the Khembali farm with his heart all aflutter. He didn’t know what he thought. Rudra was asleep and he was glad, and then sorry. He tried to sleep and could not sleep. Finally he sat up and turned on his laptop.
Thoreau was a solitary. He fell in love with his brother’s girlfriend, and proposed to her after his brother had proposed to her and been turned down. Henry too was turned down. There were rumors the girl’s father did not think the Thoreaus were good enough. But if she had insisted…Anyway Henry became a solitary. “There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.”
That night the website had something from his journal:
I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of the geese and the migration of suckers, etc., etc. But when I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here,—the cougar, panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc.,—I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed, and, as it were, emasculated country. Would not the motions of those larger and wilder animals have been more significant still? Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors. When I think what were the various sounds and notes, the migrations and works, and changes of fur and plumage which ushered in the spring and marked the other seasons of the year, I am reminded that this my life in nature, this particular round of natural phenomena which I call a year, is lamentably incomplete. I list to a concert in which so many parts are wanting. The whole civilized country is to some extent turned into a city, and I am that citizen whom I pity. All the great trees and beasts, fishes and fowl are gone.
From his journal, March 23, 1856; he had been thirty-eight years old. What would he think now, after another century and a half of destruction and loss? Maybe he would not have been surprised. He had seen it already started. Frank groaned.
“What wrong?”
“Oh nothing.